To some degree, science has just gotten too complicated to be easily understood unless you've made a genuine, focused effort to learn about it, or at least the basics. Which is why the reduction in science education and science budgets is so bad.

Another anomaly of these results is that temperature fluctuations are not uniform across the sky map. There are more variations in one direction than in another."Perhaps we could say that our universe has thrown us a curve ball, and it rarely fails to surprise us," said Krzysztof Gorski, Planck scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Personally, I’m surprised he’s surprised.

Imagine an explosion on a piece of sand or soft ground. Neither the hole nor the size and final position of the ejected material are regular and the further the material gets from the explosion, the less regularly positioned it will be.

I mention this as, last night on the news, this article was discussed and the tame professor was quite excited about the area of blue (little or no radiation) southwest of the centre. He was suggesting that this area might, by inference, help in solving the mysteries of the origin of the universe. But imagine those photos of water droplets hitting the surface – examine them and they are regular, but not that regular.

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”